Field of the Invention
The present invention is related to data management, and more particularly, to managing cache in the systems interfacing to cloud storage.
Description of the Related Art
A need to store data arises in every computer system. The amounts of data stored and the need for data access speed of computer storage grew dramatically recently, in both home and, especially, enterprise data storage solutions. Thus, computer storage systems are constantly improved for size and performance. Several techniques have been developed to speed up the storage systems.
One such technique relies on using multiple hard disk drives (HDDs) organized in array of networked storage such as Storage Area Network (SAN) or the like cloud disk structures. The clustered HDDs appear as a single data source to the user, but the system distributes the workload across the multiple drives with the help of a controller logic. This helps to spread data across a network and is relatively cost-effective.
A user can also move the data from networked HDDs to local storage and vice versa. This speeds up the computer storage, but is not effective from the view of the cloud in terms of separate users having the storage. Thus, in enterprise storage solutions, one should weigh the increased performance against the cost-effectiveness and size.
Another technique that can be used is caching in a cloud frequently used data to speed up the data access. For example, currently, some databases have a built-in caching mechanism that caches data in the RAM. The same mechanism can be used for Web and some other services. Caching technique is a lot more difficult to implement in the file systems, especially in enterprise systems and in cloud solutions. Accordingly, there is a need in the art for a mechanism to handle cached storage in systems that interface to cloud storages.